“No more embarrassing downtime” – wrong!

Posted on by Ian C.

Oh well.
Switching from 1and1 to PowWeb did not prevent outages on GBMINI 😦
Today GBMINI was down for at least an hour – but so was most of PowWeb, including MotoringFile and even PowWebs own site.

From the PowWeb site:
Take advantage of our new technology and avoid embarrassing downtime! There are multiple paths for your client to hit your website at every given point through our “Zero Downtime Hosting” platform. PowWeb is one of the few companies that offer this technology!

At least PowWeb does tell you what is going on – from the PowWeb forum tonight:
We had some http service interruptions caused by a DOS attack earlier this morning. The attack was targeting one of the sites we host on a specific cluster. It also maxed out our load balancer limits which cause problems on all clusters. The problem has been resolved and we apologize for the inconvenience. Please note that email service was not interrupted. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

I recently set up a free monitor on WebSitePulse … it sent me an email alert when GBMINI vanished, and also told me when it came back; the free service only checks every hour so I don’t know exactly how long it was down – I guess for a business paying for the more frequent monitoring would be very worthwhile.

A big “S” on the roof

Posted on by Ian C.

I have been trying to figure the size of the “S” I want painted on the roof of GBMINI#3; over the weekend I noticed M.2 on MINI2 has a slightly similar “S” on the roof of his MINI, so I contacted him and he was kind enough to send lots of pics.

I edited one to black out his checkered roof, and alter his MINIs color from yellow to red; I decided that the “S” was bigger than I wanted, so I printed a 4×4 blow-up “poster” of Scotts design – and after much cutting-and-pasting the old fashioned way, I tried the “S” on GBMINI#3 with help from Letizia (the wind was not being helpful!)

Minolta DSC
Minolta DSC
Minolta DSC

I think the size is about right – of course the colors are wrong but Julian & Scott will have no trouble getting that right! So GBMINI#3 heads off to Sublime Restorations tomorrow to be worked on, while I am away.

I turned the comments round!

Posted on by Ian C.

I have always had GBMINI set up so that posts & comments are listed “most recent first” – but it seems that everyone else has the comments listed “most recent last”.
That order makes more sense when you want to scroll down through the page and read the comments in order – generally comments have been limited and it did not make much difference but with the discussions recently it is awkward to scroll down to the end (oldest comment) then scroll back up to read the comments in order.

So I have switched the ordering of comments to match everyone else – oldest comment now appears first with the rest following in order below.

I also looked into integrating the comment entry onto the page, but I have not got there yet without ruining the page layout – so for now comment entry remains “pop-up” …

Thank you for your comments 😉